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As GF said, the difference with Harry Potter is the setting. Rowling's genius was to combine a hackneyed chosen one story about wizards and witches with a classic English boarding school coming-of-age tale.

I can't remember where I read this, but someone made a smart point about Rowling. The boarding school story in English literature is heavily involved the maintenance of the aristocratic order. In Rowling, the bad guys are the ones obsessed with the old aristocratic order, and the good guys are the inclusive ones. However, you still have an effective higher class of humans who can do magic, and no one questions their privilege. So what you get is both the superior feeling of being part of the natural aristocracy combined with the good liberal feeling of standing up for equality.

With the Wheel of Time, you have a hackneyed chosen one story set in a fantasy world (a richly imagined one, to be fair) that doesn't have any particular resonances with other genres or other contemporary concerns. So you just have a hackneyed story with loads and loads of appendices. I don't really see any reason to believe it would make good film.

Prisoner of Azkaban is easily my favorite of the Harry Potter films. Alfonso Cuaron created the cinematic version of Rowling's Hogwarts (all the other films, visually, are just attempts to rip off Cuaron) and found a resonant, kicky metaphor for puberty in all the magic stuff.

This I think would be doable. Special effects of people flying/jumping and coins zipping around the air can work visually. Pretty concise writing from Sanderson, easily likable characters, unfortunate ending that's a bit over the top, but it could be a great series.

Steven Erickson's Malazan Book of the Fallen has considerably more depth than Martin, but is probably unfilmable.

I'm through book 5. Book 1 is kind of sloppy but the other 4 have all been very good. I don't think it reaches the highs of Storm of Swords, but it's already kept its quality longer than ASoIaF. The sheer scale of things make it almost certainly unfilmable as written, but I read something a while back that Erikson wrote a pitch based on the Chain of Dogs sequence from book 2. That could probably work as a single film.

Brandon Sanderson was more than capable as a fill in author, but there were just too many threads to pull together.

I think it's a remarkable achievement to have more or less satisfactorily dealt with most of the plot lines in a mere three books. It's pretty clear that Jordan could never have finished the series himself.